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Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Infusing Technology into Literature Circles

Literature circles have been
used in the classroom for over 10 years.
The structure of literature circles promote 21st century
learning – students working together within a framework to extend themselves to
higher levels of thinking. When done
properly, students incorporate many of the Habits of the Mind skills as they
move their team forward. They not only
develop a closer relationship to the text, but also relate it to their own
world.

The ‘jobs’ that drive the
literature circle have not changed much over the years, but the means of accomplishing
those jobs has. I sat in on Tiffani Brown’s presentation on Literature Circles at the CUE Conference. She has infused different web-based
applications into the jobs, making them more fun and engaging for the
students. Here are some of her
suggestions:

Questioner: Create a Socratic
Method Blog. Use the blog as a place for
all questioners to post their inquiries.
Then consider offering bonus points for students who post thoughtful
answers to those questions.

Literary Luminary: Use Wordle or
Tagxedo to create a word cloud from a collection of quotes from the story.

Summarizer: Use TimeToast or
WhenInTime to create an on-going timeline of the story. It can be expanded as the story goes on. Another option, have students create a daily
“tweet” to summarize what they read. It’s
a challenge to do it in 140 characters or less!

CC Connection: Literature
Circles address all of the CCSS anchor standards in reading. Students
not only analyze the structure of the story they are reading, but delve deeper
into the complexity of the text. Lit
circles also integrates 21st century skills of collaboration,
creativity and critical thinking.